Low power effort in CQ160 CW via remote

I decided to try low power (LP) in CQ160 CW for the first time. I didn’t know what to expect, but I was prepared to spend lots of time with Search & Pounce in the QRM. Here is a summary of my CQ160 CW effort from SE0X operated via remote.

Remote shack with a K3/0 controlling a K3/100 at SE0X over the internet.

To my surprise I hit off running with a nice pace on Friday evening, but then everything slowed down on Saturday. The rate was miserable and all hope of a respectable score went out the window. But something happened Saturday evening at 21:00 when the the rate cam up again, and during the following two hours I was able to catch up everything lost during the day. I was again ahead of my plan and was feeling great. Then at midnight it all came to a halt and Sunday was tremendously slow. I guess by then I had already worked most of the stations that I could reach with my low power setup, and the only action on Sunday where casual contesters and a few DX. The only joy on Sunday where a few needed multipliers found through S&P.

I didn’t expect to log much DX, but to my surprise I did work some nice ones including JA, FM, and a very few NA. The most memorable contacts where logging EY8MM using only 10 watts (SM power restriction above 1850 kHz) and breaking through a dense pileup of HP stations fighting to get a multiplier from A65BP (thats a guy with good ears).

The claimed result of 222.759 points is just a few points below the current SM record (well 3.5k below). I worked 826 contacts but came in a little low on multipliers, 50 countries and 3 Statets and Provinces (VA, ME and PEI). With most of active EU countries logged, the difference would be to snag a few more states next time. Going low power was fun and although there is a difference compared to previous efforts with High Power, it was fun and challenging.

The contest was run home via remote using the K3-K3/0 combo and Remoterig interfaces. N1MM was used to log the contacts using one of Remoterig’s internal RS232 servers. Everything worked great except for a few network dropouts and a bug in the K3/Remoterig setup causing audio to mute when turning the SUB RX on or OFF. My home office is much more comfortable than the station shack, so I could get used to this.